~ Weight, Sex, and Marriage (and Motherhood); aka How to Raise Adrenaline Starved Thrill-seekers and Still be Fat and Happy.

One Night in Bangkok

Today was the day we set the boys free. They will be in Bangkok for one night and so will we. They will be in a hostel on backpack row (it has a cool Bangkok name that I don’t know) and we will be at the Bangkok Novetel Airport Hotel which I booked months in advance and prepaid for! They will take an all night train to Malaysia, while we will take an all night airplane to LAX. There you have the difference between youth and . . . . as my mother refers to it, “an over-developed frontal lobe.”

Our hope is the boys will act responsibly. In fairness to them, they only spent one night of our trip together overindulging. For the duration of our journey, they turned down offers of beer and instead would go for a daily 10 to 13 mile run followed by an ab workout. Can you hear my maternal defense mechanisms kicking into high gear? I have a feeling they will not be going for a run tonight, but let’s just hope that one striped eyebrow is the trip limit, and more importantly they look both ways.

The boys went off with their backpacks looking for a taxi (Ralphie was wearing his bathing suit, his passport and exit documents were tucked into the pocket, and all I could think was at least he bought a bathing suit with a pocket that buttoned). We hoisted our rolling suitcases into the air conditioned hotel van. A family with four young children climbed in after us. As the fourth child searched for a place to sit, a worried expression came across the mother’s tired face. She gave her equally weary husband (clearly they had been on an all night flight from the US) a puzzled look, “There are not enough seatbelts.”

“Is this your first time in Thailand?” I asked.

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1 thought on “One Night in Bangkok”

Oh, us poor mothers!! All that worrying really does change us, huh? I loved the contrast between your son’s journey, the all-night train to Malasia, and yours, the flight back to LAX. I don’t want an over-developed prefrontal lobe, I want to be young and blind again (not really blind, but you know) and unaware of how much will turn out.